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Comments681
Politics
Analysis

White House
systems failed with
Comey firing, but
Trump pushed the
buttons
Trump's shifting story on Comey turns to threats

Play Video2:47
Since President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on May 9, the explanations for the
dismissal have been getting murkier. Now Trump has tweeted a threat to cancel press briefings
and a suggestion about "tapes" of his private conversations with Comey. (Jenny Starrs/The
Washington Post)
By Philip Rucker May 13 at 5:45 PM
In deciding to abruptly fire FBI Director James B. Comey, President Trump
characteristically let himself be guided by his own instincts fueled by his
creeping anger and sense of victimhood about a probe into Russian meddling
in the 2016 election that he considers a witch hunt.

The aftermath is a presidency rocked by its most serious self-inflicted crisis

yet, exposing dysfunction and distrust within his West Wing and imperiling
his agenda. The momentum for the health-care bill that passed the House is
gone, and a week scheduled to be devoted to Trumps preparations for a high-
stakes foreign trip was overtaken by distractions and fury.
Across Washington, Trumps allies have been buzzing about the staffs
competence as well as the presidents state of mind. One GOP figure close to
the White House mused privately about whether Trump was in the grip of
some kind of paranoid delusion.

Trump has been stewing all week, aggrieved by sharp media scrutiny of his
decision to fire Comey and of his and his aides ever-shifting explanations, and
has been quick to blame his staff, according to several people who have spoken
with him.

Privately, Trump has lashed out at the communications office led by press
secretary Sean Spicer and communications director Michael Dubke and has
spoken candidly with advisers about a broad shake-up that could include
demotions or dismissals. The president personally has conducted postmortem
interviews with aides about the Comey saga, investigating the unending
stream of headlines he considers unfairly negative, according to several White
House officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Trump is
cracking down on unauthorized leaks.

The scene in Washington after FBI Director James B. Comey was fired
View Photos
President Trumps firing of James B. Comey consumed Capitol Hills attention. Democrats
slowed committee business in the Senate to protest the lack of an independent investigation into
Russias election meddling, and Republicans saw rifts emerge as more questioned the presidents
decision.

This was the first major crisis or test theyve had, and it looks like a lot of
systems failed, said Chris Ruddy, a Trump confidant and chief executive of
Newsmax. My experience with the president is when he sees failure, he
quickly adapts and tries new things. Hes not a guy that keeps the same ol.

The system may be failing, but it is Trump who is picking which buttons to
press. The president takes pride in being the ultimate decision-maker, for
matters large and small. And chaos has been a hallmark of Trumps
enterprises, from his family real estate empire to his presidential campaign, a
16-month venture during which he cycled through three leadership teams.

[Inside Trumps anger and impatience and his sudden decision to fire Comey]
Inside the White House, there was widespread agreement that Comey had to
go. But how and when Trump would fire him and how it would be
rationalized to the public was the subject of considerable debate.

Vice President Pence, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, senior adviser Jared
Kushner, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and Counsel Donald McGahn were the
closest to the president as he weighed his options, according to White House
officials.

Would Trump first visit with Comey in person and ask for his resignation or
fire him abruptly?

The president decided the latter.

How the White House communications team fumbled explanations of Comey's

firing

Play Video2:25
The Fix's Callum Borchers explains how the White House communications team fumbled
explanations of FBI Director James B. Comey's firing. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

Would Trump slow down the process so that a communications strategy could
be crafted, with credible surrogates lined up to defend his decision, or
terminate Comey about 24 hours after first telling top aides he wanted it
done?

He chose the latter.

Would Trump stick to the agreed-upon explanation for Comeys ouster or

invoke the Russia investigation, both in his Tuesday termination letter to
Comey and two days later in a television interview? And would he be
restrained on Twitter, as his advisers have urged, or peck out a provocative
salvo at Comey warning of possible tapes of their private conversations?

In both cases, Trump again chose the less prudent path.

White House aides have felt bewildered and alarmed by how Trump arrives at
his decisions often on impulse and emotion and sometimes by rejecting the
counsel of those around him and how he then communicates those
decisions to his personnel and the public. Trump is in some ways like a pilot
opting to fly a plane through heavy turbulence then blaming the flight
attendants when the passengers get jittery.

The result is a hardening portrait of sheer disarray.

The Comey firing is just the most dramatic example of a White House that is
completely dysfunctional, the most chaotic in modern history, said Chris
Whipple, author The Gatekeepers, a newly published history of White House
chiefs of staff.
Reince Priebus has made rookie mistake after rookie mistake, Whipple said.
But, ultimately, its fundamentally on Donald Trump. A chief of staff can do
very little to make the White House function if hes not empowered by his
president. That simply has not happened.

[The Take: Comey firing shows White House problems go far beyond communications
strategy]
Robert M. Gates, a former defense secretary who informally advised
Trumpduring the transition, criticized his handling of Comeys ouster.
Not terribly well done, Gates told John Dickerson in a CBS News interview
scheduled to air Sunday on Face the Nation.

I fired a lot of senior people myself, and I think the key, when you feel
compelled to remove a senior official, is essentially to have all your ducks in a
row at the beginning, Gates continued. To have the rationale, have
everybody understand what the rationale was. If possible, to be in a position to
announce who is going to step in as the interim immediately. And, if possible,
to announce who youre going to nominate to replace that person.
As Trumps anger with the Comey fallout boiled over, his aides have been
pointing fingers at one other.

Much of the internal blame has fallen to the communications operation, with
Kushner and other top officials questioning why the small army of press
staffers led by Spicer and Dubke took so long to forcefully defend the
presidents decision and agree to a set of talking points that could withstand
scrutiny, according to several White House officials.

Inside the West Wing, it became a running joke among some staffers that the
answer to every question would be Rosenstein, referring to the deputy
attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, who wrote a memo outlining a case for
Comeys ouster.

Trump loyalists were particularly upset that Senate Minority Leader Charles
E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) organized a news conference Tuesday night and got other
Democrats to parrot the same message before a full explanation came out of
the White House despite the fact that the White House controlled every
variable of the story.

They were running around like chickens with their heads cut off, said one
White House official. There was no leadership, no get your troops in a room,
and issue orders and execute.

[After Trump fired Comey, White House staff scrambled to explain why ]
Yet Trump did not inform Spicer and Dubke of his decision until about an
hour before it was announced, keeping them and other senior aides out of the
loop because he feared the news might leak prematurely, officials said.

There is confusion about whether Stephen K. Bannon, the chief strategist who
had been somewhat marginalized after feuding last month with Kushner, was
among those the president consulted about his decision. Two people familiar
with the matter said Bannon intentionally was kept out of the process. But a
third person denied that Bannon first learned Comey had been fired from
television news reports and said that he had actually counseled Trump to
delay his decision to lessen the political backlash.

Spicer and Dubke did not respond to a request for an interview. Their
defenders said they were assigned an impossible task of orchestrating on short
notice a complete rollout plan from crafting and distributing talking points
to lining up lawmakers, legal experts and other Trump supporters to give
interviews.

The explanation delivered Tuesday night by Spicer, counselor to the president

Kellyanne Conway and deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders that
Trump acted decisively at the recommendation of Rosenstein and Sessions
was discussed with and agreed to by the president himself, officials said.

Trump then changed his story, telling NBC News on Thursday that he made
the decision to fire Comey on his own and would have done so regardless of
Rosensteins recommendation.

We were absolutely given the information that we could have at that time,
Sanders told reporters Thursday. It was a quick-moving process. We took the
information we had, as best we had it, and got it out to the American people as
quickly as we could.
Trump defended his spokesmen, tweeting Friday that they should not be
expected to speak with perfect accuracy and later complaining to Fox News
personality Jeanine Pirro about the level of hostility against them. But
Trump went on to tell Pirro that he was considering canceling regular press
briefings except for when he does them himself.
Some of Trumps allies said they are worried that the president views the
Comey episode entirely as a public-relations crisis a branding problem
and has not been judicious about protecting himself from legal exposure as the
FBI continues to investigate possible links between his campaign and Russia.

[Trump said he was thinking of Russia controversy when he decided to fire Comey]
When Trump sat down for the interview with NBC anchor Lester Holt, his
aides were not certain what he might say. The president improvised,
essentially and, in one stream-of-consciousness answer, invited potential
legal peril by connecting his firing of Comey to the Russia matter.

In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, You know, this
Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, its an excuse by the
Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won, Trump told
Holt.

Trump also revealed that he had asked Comey on three separate occasions
once over dinner and twice in phone calls whether he was under
investigation by the FBI and said that Comey had told him he was not.

It is Justice Department policy that ongoing investigations generally are not to

be discussed with White House officials.

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Trump is so unsophisticated about government, and he lacks even basic

knowledge about how the government functions, of what the unwritten but
very important rules and traditions are. His attitude toward all those things is
they dont matter: Im going to drain the swamp! said a veteran of past
Republican administrations who is close to the Trump White House and spoke
on the condition of anonymity to candidly critique the president.
 Pollster Patrick H. Caddell, a longtime confidant of Bannon who served in
Jimmy Carters White House, said he was pained to watch the Trump White
House struggle.

Its like reliving the Carter administration on steroids, Caddell said. This is
an outsider administration being surrounded by Apache knives. Every inch of
the political class and both parties are going after him. The president cant
afford in this type of environment to not execute these kinds of
announcements better.

Damian Paletta and Robert Costa contributed to this report.

681

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Philip Rucker is the White House Bureau Chief for The Washington Post. He previously has
covered Congress, the Obama White House, and the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns. He
joined The Post in 2005 as a local news reporter.
Follow @PhilipRucker

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